To you, it looks like Musk unblocked journalists like me. It’s an illusion: The truth is that we are still locked out of our accounts. I’VE BEEN WRITING critically about billionaire Elon Musk since he took over Twitter — particularly about his “free speech” hypocrisy and his censorship of left-wing accounts. This must have angered him. Last week, he suspended me and eight other journalists from Twitter. We had all pointed out that Musk censored a Twitter account, @ElonJet, which used public data to post the location of his private jet, but that @ElonJet had moved to rival social networks, like Mastodon, that didn’t censor the account. Musk accused us of “doxxing” him by posting “assassination coordinates” and then tried to blame his outburst on an alleged stalking incident that had nothing to do with the @ElonJet account. My suspension lasted just a few days before my account was reinstated. When people visit my Twitter profile, it no longer says “account suspended,” and it looks as if I’m back on the platform. Friends and strangers alike have reached out to me saying it’s good to see that I’m back on Twitter. It’s an illusion. In reality, I’m still locked out of my Twitter account unless I agree to delete a specific tweet at the behest of the billionaire. Several of the other suspended journalists are in the same boat. (Twitter, where the communications team was decimated by Musk’s layoffs, did not immediately reply to a message for comment.) (…) To unlock my account, I must remove the offending tweet, which in my case said, “Twitter just banned Mastodon’s official Twitter account @joinmastodon with 174,000 followers, probably because it tweeted a link to @ElonJet’s Mastodon account. Twitter is now censoring posting the link, but the user is @[email protected].”
via theintercept: Elon Musk Is Still Silencing the Journalists He Banned From Twitter